It would be presumptuous to declare that in the first weekend of February, we’ve already found the worst film of 2011 – a year that will see the release of Transformers: Bang, Zoom, To the Moon, lest we forget – but The Roommate encourages that kind of presumption. A trashy crypto-remake of Single White Female […]
Somewhere in all the swampiness of wasted acting talent and artificially-flavored heteronormativity and a terror of sex that masks itself in acres of naked movie star flesh and filty dialogue, No Strings Attached is hiding a deep, dark secret: it’s actually not that bad. It’s not that good either, of course. There’s little hope for […]
I like to imagine that Jacques Demy first thought up The Umbrellas of Cherbourg as a direct response to Jean-Luc Godard’s 1961 A Woman Is a Woman. That film, a splashy Technicolor Cinemascope musical, was also every inch a Godard film: amiably cynical, eager to tear itself apart and reveal all of the ways that […]
I have not read Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, a widely-praised 2005 novel about life of a certain sort in a dystopian Britain in an alternate 20th Century. But I sort of feel as though I have read it, thanks to the new film adaptation written by Alex Garland (a sometime-collaborator of Danny Boyle), […]
Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: nothing says “desperately garish” like a dance movie sequel titled Step Up 3D. But isn’t that exactly what we […]
By every functional yardstick, Step Up 3D is a stupid movie. This is such an undeniable fact that the only debate worth having is on the precise modality of its stupidity: is it willfully stupid? criminally stupid? delightfully stupid? extravagantly stupid? Yes, yes, DEFINITELY YES, yes. Part of me – nor a small part – […]
The latest entry in Summit Entertainment’s multi-year attempt to bore the art of filmmaking to death, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse has been warily described in certain corners as “better” than 2008’s Twilight or last autumn’s The Twilight Saga: New Moon. Which takes quite a lot of fine parsing, and for what possible reason: At the […]
O marketing gurus with your fixation on playing keep-away with spoilers take note: I had no intention whatsoever of seeing Remember Me. It didn’t hit #1 at the box office, and otherwise, the only thing that seemed remotely interesting was the promise of a grim spectacle as Twilight star Robert Pattinson fought a mighty, losing […]
The sequel to 2008’s Twilight is one of those movies where you’re not exactly sure even what the title is. The ad campaign clearly describes it as The Twilight Saga: New Moon, which is probably the “right” title, despite being clumsy and stupid; the opening of the film merely states New Moon, following the title […]
Now, let’s make things clear: I have seen many stupid movies in my life. But I Still Know What You Did Last Summer would still count among the stupidest, had I seen twice as many movies in half again as many genres. It’s just So Goddamn Dense, in a rarefied way that transcends any other […]
Really, do you just love lens flares a lot? Because you know who absolutely gets the world’s biggest hard-on from lens flares, is J.J. Abrams. I don’t know that it’s fair to start up with Abrams’s Star Trek, a massive rejiggering of the megalithic sci-fi franchise, by bitching about lens flares, of all things, but […]
When people like me are pressed to justify our love of those nasty, horrid exploitation movies of the 1970s – and I should mention that people like me are never actually pressed to make this justification, for the other people, not like me, are usually content simply to ignore people like me and dispose of […]
